The presence of even minute quantities of water in contact with metallized areas of a semiconductor device can lead to corrosion of the metal and failure of the component. Manufacturers of these devices attempt to prevent contamination by coating them with layers of passivating material, but such layers can have defects through which water can penetrate. The amounts of water able to pass through the defects are so small that it is difficult to detect their presence. Feature dimensions of semiconductor devices may be on the order of a micron, and water that has to be detected may be distributed within the hygrometric SiO.sub.2 planarizing layer which is usually deposited before the passivation layers. The water may form thin pools only a few microns in lateral extent and only a fraction of a micron deep. The volume in such a pool is on the order of a cubic micron, which is about a picogram of liquid water. Detection of such localized regions of water requires the use of microprobe techniques, but since these regions can be anywhere on the semiconductor device, every microscopic area must be examined, which makes it necessary to scan the entire surface of the device, area by area.
It is typical to form such devices on silicon wafers having a diameter of about 10 cm. and each device may be about 5 mm. sq. It would not be commercially acceptable to have to spend too much time in the water-detection process, and each individual measurement of an incremental area needs to be carried out in about 1 millisecond.
Neither Raman scattering nor nuclear resonance techniques are sensitive enough to detect such small quantities of water, but water does have strong radiation absorption bands in the region of 2.7 .mu.m to about 3.5 .mu.m, which makes infrared testing a possibility. Standard types of infrared testing by means of a grating or even a Fourier transform instrument capable of generating a full spectrum could be used to detect the presence of water in semiconductor devices, but their use would be too time-consuming.